Wednesday, 23 January 2013

Drunk Robots - Collapsing Labyrinth

Single review by kev@thesoundofconfusion.co.uk

Just how do you go about naming instrumental pieces of music? Some are purely and simply based on the music (Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells', much of Brian Eno's stuff like 'Music For Airports') and others make sense because of samples used or what the music is supposed to represent (Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons' for example). Sometime people just use ridiculous and abstract names though, which is kind of funny I suppose, but the naming of instrumental music can still be puzzling on occasion. Quite which of these approaches Portugal's Drunk Robots have gone for we can't quite work out. So let's have a blind guess!

Right, I think they came up with a title, 'Collapsing Labyrinth', because it sounds quite dramatic, unusual and a bit mysterious. Labyrinths are embedded in legends, so the music would need to be dramatic and probably come with a bit of a fear factor, or at the very least be a bit ominous. It's like something from a strange historical saga or a myth-based computer game. You'd need it to have an urgency; these people need to find their way out of this maze before it disappears completely! So it's lucky then that 'Collapsing Labyrinth' does all of those things. Job done.